BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — British actor Tom Hiddleston is a man of many Shakespeare
characters.

He plays the shallow Prince Hal in two of the Bard’s “king” plays (Henry IV, both parts) that have been airing on the PBS series
The Hollow Crown.

And, tonight, when he becomes the besieged king of England — Henry V — he will be charged with
the battle of a lifetime, the fate of a nation in his hands.

“Prince Hal is an archetype of what, I think, possibly every young man goes through — to test
his limits and push boundaries and reject the authority of his father and live in a way that he was
not supposed to and has been discouraged from doing,” Hiddleston said.

“And (he) slowly goes on a journey of accepting responsibility and embracing his inheritance. I
think that rings true of so many great characters in all drama and all history.”

Early on, Prince Hal is a rebel with no cause.

“He starts out rebellious, drunk, mischievous, wayward and youthful,” Hiddleston said. “And then
he becomes the greatest warrior king that England

has ever had.”

His experiences as a young man, the actor said, help make him a great warrior and a great
king.

Because of production schedules, the four plays were filmed in reverse.
Henry V, airing tonight, is chronologically the last but was the first to be shot.
Hiddleston, 32, had to “age backward” for the part.

On his first day of filming, he was forced to grasp the gravity of young Henry’s situation as he
is poised on the battlefield, facing the French at impossible odds. That’s where the famous speech “
Once more into the breach ...” is delivered.

“When Henry V is besieging a French castle,” Hiddleston explained, “they’re on a military
mission, and his men make a breach, a hole in the castle wall. But it isn’t complete. And then the
French army comes tearing out of this hole in the castle, and the English run away.

“And Henry’s response is ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall
up with our English dead.’ And it becomes the most extraordinary motivational speech that’s better
than any locker-room speech you’ve ever heard in any movie about American football.”

Many Americans probably remember Hiddleston as the evil villain Loki in both
Thor and
The Avengers.

His first Shakespearean role was in the fairly obscure
Timon of Athens. Hiddleston was 14 and played Timon’s 65-year-old manservant with a gray
wig, a gray beard and a pocket watch.

He has never forgotten those lines.

But seeing a production of
Twelfth Night convinced him that Shakespeare was accessible even to an adolescent boy.

“It was the most beautiful, rich, dazzling, hilarious, touching production. And that’s when I
think I began to understand that Shakespeare must be spoken as a contemporary language. It cannot
be speechified. It cannot.”